Why Death Matters: Understanding Gameworld Experience

This article presents a study of the staging and implementation of death and the death penalty in a number of popular MMOGs and relates it to players general experience of gameworlds. Game mechanics, writings and stories by designers and players, and the results of an online survey are analysed and discussed. The study shows that the death penalty is implemented much in the same way across worlds; that death can be both trivial and non-trivial, part of the grind of everyday life, or essential in the creation of heroes, depending on context. In whatever function death may serves, it is argued that death plays an important part in the shaping and emergence of the social culture of a world, and in the individual players experience of life within it.